Graeme Archer works as a statistician, and is a winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Blogging. He writes a column in Saturday's Daily Telegraph.

Are the European Commission really anti-EU sleeper agents?

It's as though they're secret agents, in the employ of Better Off Out: the European Commission has responded to the nation's concerns over the coming influx of Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants to the UK … by lecturing us that overall the impact of their arrival will be "positive". They will work! They will pay tax! They're allowed to come anyway according to the rules of Union, so shaddapyouface!

In response to voter concern, the Government will announce a restriction on the right of newcomers to access benefits and … oh come on. We've been told that before, haven't we? I've a distinct memory of Labour ministers simultaneously downplaying the numbers who'd travel to Britain from the east, while reassuring us that there's no way on Tony Blair's Earth that any who did come would be able to access housing benefit or child benefit or so on.

Such restrictions don't work. They don't work for two reasons: first, they don't address the underlying political itch that the voters want to have scratched (Britain should have complete control of its borders.)

Government crackdowns on benefits to be paid to newcomers are as (in)effective in assuaging that worry as the neoliberal argument about free trade and movement. Rich factory owners benefit from an influx of hardworking, low-waged workers: this is true. It's not a compelling political argument though, is it?

The second failure in those restrictions is economic. The DWP publishes statistics of total benefit claimants, categorised by country of claimant origin at the time of National Insurance registration. This report from January 2012 makes fascinating reading (hat-tip to the Spectator's Alex Massie, within whose writing I found a linked reference to the report.) It is worth reading the whole thing. Two statistics leapt at me:

• In February 2011, 16.6 per cent of working-age Britons were receiving a benefit, compared to 6.6 per cent of non-UK nationals
• There are about 371,000 non-UK claimants (compared to just over 5 million Brits). Of these, about 14,000 are Polish.

To put that into tabloid-speak: indigenous working-age Brits are more than twice as workshy as those born abroad. We often say of newcomers that they'd be more welcome if they'd assimilate, if they'd act more British. We don't mean that with regard to benefit dependency though, do we? Benefit crackdowns on eastern European newcomers don't work because there are so few claimants to crack down upon.

Which is why I believe the Commission is in the pay of Better Off Out. Because the neoliberals are, of course, right, and Britain is improved by its newcomers from (for example) Poland.

But the voters are right, too, and every time a supranational body lectures our government on what it may or may not do in the management of its borders, two things happen: (1) another liberal Tory resolves that he'll vote to leave the EU when we have the referendum in 2017, and (2) the case for managed immigration becomes harder to make at all.

That case is best made by anecdote, not statistics. Of course you notice any antisocial behaviour of people with hitherto uncommon accents – the new consonants, that "zhh-zhhing" that you're starting to like, acts as a flag. But you should, by now, also be noticing how fond you are of that young woman who gets up as early as you do, to open up Costa in your town centre, so you can sit and read the Telegraph while sipping her coffee. That this morning she said "We don't do well when it snows in Britain", and how struck you were by that "we".

You should maybe see how that exotic-sounding delikatesy, which replaced a shut-up shop on the High Street, has morphed from slightly scuzzy-looking foreign thing to a fully functioning "how cool is this place?" enterprise. This is called capitalism: we used to be quite good at it ourselves.

The "you" in those last two paragraphs is, of course, me; but I doubt my experience is unique. The Commission's boot-kicking, "do what we say" approach to within-EU movements makes the reasonable case for managed immigration that much harder to make at all, and while that's not the most disgusting example of unelected Commission arrogance, it's also far from the least.